Sanka7a

What Is Not Lead Nurturing?

Many marketers around the world have two common question in mind, What is lead nurturing? and how one can define it? Many specialist have tried to define the term in their own way. Here, I will share with you a definition shared by Jon Miller, VP of marketing at Marketo: “Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship by conducting an informative dialog that helps qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing – and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time”.

It is very easy to mix the objective and believe in everything that comes under the spectrum of lead nurturing or marketing automation technology or software. Their is more to it if you understand the definition, It is possible to acquire a really great lead nurturing application and still miss the point of creating a conversation and touching base with leads through content in a close loop till they are sales ready. Thus, it is very important to understand what is not lead nurturing.

The important factor is to able to differentiate between creating a periodic email marketing campaign and setting up a lead nurturing program. Next, every email should not be an outright attempt to sell or make an offer. Selling is done for the leads which are nurtured and ready to be sold. In nurturing stages, leads are absorbing information and content which can help them to solve their problem and know when they are ready to buy.

Auto responder email programs have gained immense popularity as lead nurturing tools but it works well when used properly. In the same way newsletter programs can be sent using the same technology. So make sure when you are planning your program, stand back and check whether it fits the goal of your program.…

How Email Marketing Can Generate Quality Leads

In some quarters, emailing marketing has a less than optimal reputation. Some see it simply as the refuge of ‘spammers’, a low-rent way for businesses to try and grab the attention of their customers, while generally succeeding only in irritating them. It doesn’t have to be like that. Over the last couple of years email has evolved and progressed through the use of in-depth analytical tools that allow for highly targeted and relevant campaigns. Good quality email campaigns can offer a great ROI and is an excellent opportunity work on customer and B2B lead generation.

Email marketing can easily be outsourced to specialist marketing firms. They will generally be able to offer a full email package designed to help your business win customers in a targeted way. Rather than untargeted campaigns that drive away as many customers as they gain, modern marketing aims to reach the right people and generate real leads. Rather than simply driving traffic to a website, quality email campaigns concentrate on customer and B2B lead generation. They generally do this by tracking and analysing behaviour.

After a marketing email has been sent, a lead generation tool can be used to work out which of the website hits that result from it are likely to be real leads. It can see when people have logged on to the site, how long they spent there, and whether and when they return. A customer who logs on repeatedly and frequently is, naturally, far more likely to be a good lead than one on who logs on once. This kind of information then needs to be used effectively. It could be sent to sales staff, who can then make calls to follow up the leads. It could also be used to trigger an automatic email, creating a kind of targeted email marketing ‘virtuous circle’.

Effective email marketing that is combined with automatic customer and B2B lead generation in this way is intelligent marketing that can build business for the future. As with any kind of marketing campaign, it needs to be well handled in order to work, and the automated side of it is only part of the story. Without good sales people in place to back it up, it will not produce the kind of returns your business needs. However, with commitment and a holistic approach, using automatic lead generation can transform a very ordinary email marketing campaign into a huge success.…

Avoiding Marketing Automation That Breaks the Rules

Did you ever find articles on website marketing with advice that prescribed marketing automation methods for success? Did they seem too good and even too wild to be true? Marketing automation the way these popular articles speak of it, is the use of a piece of software that is designed to automatically post on blogs, create accounts with social networking and other sites, extract e-mails, and in general, to do a lot of legwork for you to push your website up in the popularity ratings in a way it doesn’t deserve. There are lots of these marketing automation software packages out there with names like Extract Master and Extreme Cash Robot that are marketed as great ways by which to quickly promote your website. There’s just one problem with all of this – Google and all of the other major search engines use sophisticated methods to try to judge whether a site uses these illegal marketing automation methods. And they will quickly ban a website when they find evidence. While not all marketing automation is this way, you need to know which ones to avoid, to keep your website safe from any risk of being banned. Let’s look at some examples of unsavory marketing automation to help you stay in the clear.

Your number one implementation of marketing automation software to avoid would be of the e-mail extractor variety. There are many reasons why software of this kind will not really help you at all. To begin with, most websites that require you to sign up and register, have all kinds of hoops they will have the software jump through. Even if the software succeeds at first, it’s only a matter of time before it’s caught and your website is taken off of search engine indexes. In the end, you’ll be left with a bunch of e-mail addresses you generated that will not be of any use.

As for software that is claimed to be able to create accounts on blogs, social networks and forums and to the able to post on them, those are just untruthful claims. Any of these places has tests in place to help tell the real sign-ups apart from the automated ones. The easiest way they have of doing this is with a Captcha image – where they put up an image of a number or a word and ask whoever is signing up, to type in what they see. Marketing automation software is never going to be able to get past this one. And even if these packages do get past all the safeguards that have been in place, you probably won’t get very far posting as much as you need to, to get any mileage out of these activities. These places have rules for how much you are allowed to post.

So there you go – there is a right way and wrong way to automate your marketing. Build ethical link farms, and in general, try …

Building Better Customer Relations With Personalization

Personalization is the number one strategic action your business can take.

Why Personalize?

Marketing today has evolved into something much more than creating advertising collaterals and sending them to everyone in the company database. Marketers can no longer survive with a blindfolded approach to prospecting. This is because the prospect profiles have changed radically. In today’s internet age, prospects are more informed than ever before. They also have a lot of choice when it comes to selecting the right vendor. In order to strike a chord with the prospects in such environment, the marketing team has to focus on establishing a personal, one to one relationship with the prospect. Only building this relationship and cementing it over a period of time will enable the business to gain an edge over competition. In this scenario, Personalization becomes an indispensable tool.

Personalization-The Concept

Personalization involves understanding customers, anticipating their needs and positioning the business’s solutions in a manner so as to add value to the customers. The spectrum of personalization is very wide. At the lowest end lies something as simple as sending out e-mails that address the recipients by their names and further up lie custom landing pages and the ability of the business to anticipate and offer products/services tailored to suit the individual customer needs.

Cases for Personalization

A study conducted by the Aberdeen Group states 87% of retailers believe that personalization will bring about significant changes to their business. 41% of the retailers mentioned that personalization helped their business attain higher levels of customer satisfaction. The study also listed Personalization as the number one strategic action that a business needs to take. The US Banker magazine carried an article in which the chief marketing and innovation officer for AXA Equitable mentioned that the return on investment with respect to dollars spent on personalization was almost 5 times.

Key Ingredients

Personalization requires three key ingredients to be in place. One-Collection of prospect information, Two-Availability of this information in real time, Three-Ability to act upon this information so as to add value to the prospect/customer. Once a business has these three key aspects in place, the only thing left to do is to find a platform that will enable a seamless integration of all these three to enhance customer experience.

Want to create personalized marketing materials such as database-driven flyers, postcards, newsletters, proposals, and other print-quality documents? Try MindMatrix’s inVision-a leading marketing automation software that can bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Whether it is through E-mails, Print, HTML templates, Flash or PowerPoint presentations, MindMatrix offers solutions to suit all your marketing needs.…

How Marketing Automation Software Can Help You Solve Your Demand Generation Challenges?

A well-built Marketing Automation Software can help you get better results from its demand generation efforts by enhancing the various steps in the demand generation process. It streamlines the process and provides marketing with valuable prospect/customer data, which can be used to increase the overall effectiveness of the business’s demand generation strategy. Following are the advantages of automating the demand generation process –

Complete customer view – An ideal marketing automation software provides the business with a holistic view of its prospects. Once the marketing team has a 360A� view of its prospects, it can modify its demand generation campaigns to complement prospect behavior.

Personalized marketing & sales tactics – Research has proven time and again that personalized marketing bears better results than generic, mass-produced efforts. Prospects/customers tend to favor brands that personalize products and solutions to suit their needs. Personalization enhances value from the customer perspective.

Content syndication – As prospects/customers interact with the business on various platforms, there’s a need for the business to utilize these numerous channels to drive home its message. Marketing Automation Software with built-in content syndication mechanism enables a business to consistently deliver the same message across all communication channels.

Staying in touch with prospects – Research indicates that only about 15% of leads are immediately willing to buy. While about 20% are disqualified initially, the remaining 65% are mildly interested in the product/service, but not ready to invest in it right away. The business must stay in touch with such prospects and keep the leads warm, so that when it’s time to make the buying decision, the prospect remembers the brand. By choosing the right marketing automation software a business can communicate with its prospects through various channels including e-mails, web pages, social networking sites, blogs, and information-sharing portals.

Multiple output support – Prospects now have a multitude of ways to reach out to vendors. These include the web, social media and other information sharing sites. Facebook has around 400 million users, while Twitter has around 75 million and LinkedIn is catching up with over 65 million users. That means millions of prospects. Marketing Automation Software allows the business to communicate with its prospects across all these platforms.

Brand management – Managing your brand and keeping marketing materials updated is never going to be a problem once you use a marketing automation software. For example, SpeedWheels, a company manufacturing high-end bicycles. SpeedWheels has presentations and flyers made for each new model. Let’s assume that the price of Model II changes. If a pricing change were made in the presentations, the same would be automatically reflected in the flyers as well.

Understanding prospect/customer behavior – Marketing Automation Software provides business with a 360-degree view of the following question can be answered by deploying the right automation system –

Did the prospects visit the company site?

Which links did they click on? Did they open an e-mail?

How many e-mails did marketing send …

Marketing Automation, How It Works and How to Use It Properly

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a way to collect information, trigger events based on that information and produce workflows to engage the human touch. It has revolutionized the way B2B companies and large purchase B2C companies structure their marketing programs. The online marketing world has made it possible collect large amounts of data about your customer’s interactions, which in return is making it difficult to manage all of this data.

Customer Interaction

An online presence no longer consists of building a website and calling it a day. In order to stay competitive you now have to get a share of your market’s web traffic. Then you need your website to act more like an amusement park then a bridge, meaning you want them to hang out for a while. Not only do you want them to hang out, you want them to be engaged and ultimately converting. In the B2B world, most sales don’t happen in an online shopping cart. They visit your site multiple times reading expert advice, downloading white papers and watching videos before they decide to engage with you. With marketing automation you can track what your customers are doing from their first click to a sale.

Automate Your Process

While your customers are hanging out at your site wouldn’t it be nice to know when a visitor checks out your pricing page? With marketing automation you have the ability to identify who’s been to your pricing page and to ping someone on your sales team. You now have a warm lead and the ability to make certain that the sales team follows up on it. Automating these processes eliminates human error and guarantees that a hard earned lead is being followed up on. You can set up triggers to notify sales, engage managers, escalate untouched leads, nurture them once they go stale, and ultimately anything that can help the sales process.

Beat the Competition

Marketing automation tools have become very powerful and can give you a competitive advantage during this adaption phase. Even companies that have adapted to this tool have not quite harnessed the full power of it. Getting your company on board now can leave your competition in the dust. Make sure you do your research and build a solid program to implement a marketing automation solution to its full capacity.

Marketing Automation Tools

Currently, there are many leading tools for automation. Find a tool that integrates well with your CRM. If you are planning to adopt an automated marketing tool for your company it is recommended that you hire a consultant.…

CRM – The Secret Language

A golden rule of writing is that you are never supposed to write about your family members. Well, I’m going to break that rule, ever so subtly, to make a very important point about the width and depth of communication that CRM software can provide a business organization.

I remember something extraordinary about my relationship with my husband, from the very onset of it. I remember that we didn’t have to talk a lot because we simply understood each other so well. It was sort of secret language in many ways. We could be listening to a friend at a party and make eye contact and convey an emotion, position or sometimes what seemed like an entire conversation through a facial expression or body language that no one else could have even picked up on. Over the years, as our relationship has grown, that secret language (greater understanding with few words) has only strengthened. I think secret languages are pretty common among people that are close. Parents and children have a secret language. Many siblings have a secret language. Best friends of many years sometimes have a secret language. As you read this, you probably have someone that comes to mind that you share a secret language with.

So, how do we emulate that level of understanding and communication outside of a one-on-one relationship? How do we make that natural depth of communication applicable in our business lives? How do we magnify the depth of communication that usually exists between two people (a sales manager and a buyer, as a business example) into a company-wide relationship that is between two companies? How do we create a level of understanding that goes beyond words and goes to anticipating and fulfilling the needs of the other party without being told?

That secret language is really an awareness of needs. When a true connection is made either socially or professionally it is because both parties feel the other one understands them. Suppose you communicated with your customers with the same awareness as someone near and dear, and were able to capture their needs in a way that would differentiate you from your competition? Suppose you could revisit this captured information and used it to anticipate and fulfill the needs of the customer? Suppose not only you could access that information, but your customer service department, or other support staff had access to that same information and were also anticipating the customers needs and working to fulfill them without being told? Suppose the next steps of fulfilling those needs were automated and happened without any more of your time or energy?

That’s a lot to imagine, but in reality it’s much more tangible than a secret language. All of these things are possible through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. If you had these abilities would it change the dynamic of your relationship with your customers? Would it change the way your customer views you and your company? Would it …

Hate Cold Calling For Your Network Marketing Business? – Check This Out!

So you’ve talked to your friends, family, neighbours and even co-workers about your network marketing or MLM business; and you’re finally turning to cold-calling because you’ve run out of prospects. I agree with you that cold calling can be painful, but not if you try the following strategy.

In order to succeed at cold calling to grow your Network Marketing or MLM business you need to get your prospects chasing you and coming to you and wanting more. I know that this sounds crazy, but here’s just ONE method that I’ve personally used in the past and that has had a great impact on my network marketing business.

For starters, you need to find people who are looking for an opportunity because that simply makes your life easier. Second, you need to set the frame that you are the leader and you’re choosing them and not the other way around. They should be glad that they are joining your network marketing business.

Start by looking at employment sites like and . If you have the money to register as an employer than go ahead, but chances are that it’s going to be too expensive. What these sites do is that they will let you look at resumes but they will take the names of the prospects out; THAT OK. Look for candidates in your area and start cold calling.

For this approach to succeed, you need to set the frame. You’re looking to expand your team and you need people who are determined, coachable and have a will to succeed. Let them know that you might take them and that you might not, which is true because the fact is that you don’t want anyone on your network marketing team.

Ask them about their dreams and goals and if you like them, tell them that they will need to do a face to face interview in order for you to accept them in your network marketing team.

Give it a shot and let me know.…